Windows Phone 10 released this Wednesday?

Microsoft is scheduled to hold a major Windows event this Wednesday (21 January), where it is expected to unveil a preview of Windows 10 and Windows Phone 10 – Windows 10 running on phones.

Rumours have been circulating as far back as November when Microsoft was said to have released builds of Windows Phone 10 to its partners. But this Wednesday’s announcement may well be the first public glimpse of the system that is expected to fully unveiled this summer or autumn.

Windows Phone 10 will not be on sale as such but will be installed on new phones and be available as a free upgrade to existing Windows Phones running Windows 8.1.

One of the first Windows Phone 10 handsets is thought to be the Microsoft Lumia 940 which is rumoured to have a 2.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 chip and 3GB of RAM – heftier than any predecessor.

One big question is whether Microsoft will scrap live tiles altogether as predicted by ex-Nokia executive Eldar Murtazin, who famously claimed on Twitter that with Windows Phone 10 Microsoft would move to a design more like Android – a claim immediately denied by the Windows Phone design team chirped in to say he was wrong.

GSMArena has leaked the following images, which originally appeared in China, and supposedly show Windows Phone 10 with the Start screen, Office, new transparent tiles and a redesigned settings menu.